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Community-driven online sports network Bleacher Report launches

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Following months of beta testing, Bleacher Report formally launched its community-driven online sports network, providing all sports fans one place to create, critique and consume compelling coverage on their favorite college and professional teams. Bleacher Report’s open, collaborative platform features a peer-editing system that helps ensure high quality fan-generated coverage on the site. While in beta, the site grew to more than 400,000 monthly unique visitors and 2,000 original sports editorials published per month– drastically outpacing similar outlets in both web and print media. In addition, Bleacher Report announced it has raised a Series A round of funding led by Hillsven Capital, a partnership of Bobby Lent and Boris Putanec, former co-founders of Ariba Inc., along with other investors.

Bleacher Report was founded by Dave Finocchio, Alexander Freund, Bryan Goldberg, and Dave Nemetz, four lifelong sports fans from Silicon Valley. The group shared a belief that mainstream sports media didn’t offer the range or depth of coverage to satisfy diehards, and that some of the most insightful analysis comes from the fans who know their teams best. With Bleacher Report, they created a platform to empower all fans to become fan-journalists, producing high-quality content and sharing it with a built-in readership of hundreds of thousands.

Bleacher Report

Originally posted on February 19, 2008 @ 11:43 am

Ticketmaster and MLB extends multi-year ticketing partnership

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Ticketmaster MLB Advanced Media LP (MLBAM), the interactive media and internet company of Major League Baseball (MLB), announced the extension of their existing multi-year ticketing services contract. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The new agreement provides Ticketmaster with the continued right to sell tickets over the internet on behalf of individual MLB teams for which Ticketmaster provides exclusive offline primary ticketing services. Baseball fans continue to display an unprecedented demand for purchasing tickets online as a record 27 million were sold in 2007, a 17 percent increase from the previous mark set in 2006.

Originally posted on February 14, 2008 @ 10:24 am

AOL hosts 6th Annual Super Sunday Ad Poll

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AOL is featuringthe popular Super Sunday Ad Poll as a key component of its Super Bowl coverage. The gallery, sponsored by Verizon, lets fans watch, rank and share their favorite Super Bowl commercials at AOL Sports. In addition to the gallery, AOL Sports will feature exclusive columns, quizzes, interactive forums, photo galleries and FanHouse bloggers on-site in Phoenix.

The 6th Annual Super Sunday Ad Poll will let fans watch each commercial, comment on and rate their favorite ads. The ad poll will begin shortly after kick-off and will run for a week. New this year, users can rank their favorites instead of just voting for one, so the top rated commercials may change over the course of the week. AOL will show the list of the top 10 as currently ranked by users. Fans will also be able to comment on each commercial right on the site.

AOL also will feature Super Bowl content across its network, including: Rockin’ Football facts from Spinner; tips on entertaining from Pat Smith, Super Bowl legend Emmitt Smith’s wife, and more on Black Voices; and links to the best places to visit, stay and celebrate in Phoenix, as well as a guide to events in cities across the country on AOL CityGuide.

Originally posted on January 24, 2008 @ 11:05 am

MLB.com completes record year for 2007 with 20 million unique visitors in December

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MLB Advanced Media announced that it recorded 19.4 million unique visitors in the month of December for MLB.com and its affiliate sites. Adding the December mark to the remaining 11 monthly unique visitor figures in 2007 yielded a collective total of 497.6 million monthly unique visitors for the MLB.com portal.

Originally posted on January 24, 2008 @ 5:37 am

Award-winning journalist Hal Bodley joins MLB.com

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MLB Advanced Media, the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball, has hired longtime USA Today baseball columnist Hal Bodley as senior correspondent. Bodley will provide fans with his unique perspective of the game across various platforms as a columnist and on-air analyst on MLB.com.

Bodley, who has covered the game since 1958, has attended nearly every major event in the sport, including 43 World Series and 41 All-Star Games, has worked more than 4,000 games, has seen more than 36,000 innings played and has interviewed thousands of baseball personnel and six sitting Presidents of the United States. He has also written two best-selling baseball books: The Team That Wouldn’t Die, an account of the Philadelphia Phillies 1980 championship year, and Countdown to Cobb, a chronicle of Pete Rose’s 1985 pursuit of Ty Cobb’s career hits record.

Originally posted on January 17, 2008 @ 12:01 pm